IN THIS GUIDE · A qualifying year broken by an earlier stint in the United States
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
How the qualifying year is counted
The requirement is one continuous year of employment with the qualifying organization abroad within the three years immediately preceding the petition. Two features matter here. The employment must be abroad, so periods spent working in the United States are generally not counted toward the year, though in the usual case they can extend the three-year window in which the year is sought. And the year must be continuous. For a director who has moved back and forth, the exercise is arithmetic performed on payroll and travel records rather than a recollection of how long they have been with the company, and it should be done before anything else in the case is drafted. Do not treat a title as proof of capacity. Compare the person’s actual decisions, reporting lines, budget authority, and personnel role with the proposed position, then identify the records that corroborate each point.
Reconstruct the record before you rely on it
The evidence for this is unglamorous: payroll registers, employment contracts and amendments, travel history from passport stamps and entry records, assignment letters, and expense records showing where the person actually was. Companies that reconstruct this properly sometimes find they have more qualifying time than they thought, because an assignment they remembered as a year abroad was in fact a series of short trips with the employee based in Canada throughout. Others find the opposite. Either way, the answer belongs on a spreadsheet with dates and documents attached, and it should be prepared before a filing date is promised to anyone. A contemporaneous spreadsheet is more dependable than a narrative assembled after a request for evidence. Flag unpaid leave, secondments, and time physically spent in the United States, then link every interval to payroll and travel evidence.
The seven-year ceiling counts the earlier time
Time already spent in the United States in this classification counts toward the seven-year maximum for a managerial or executive role. An employee with a previous assignment therefore begins the new posting with part of that allowance already used, and the company should know how much before it plans around a long-term presence. Where the intention is that the person stays indefinitely, permanent residence is a separate project with its own requirements and its own timeline, and it should be raised at the beginning rather than in the final year, when options narrow considerably. The company should record every prior period in the classification and calculate the remaining allowance before offering a multiyear posting. The statutory ceiling does not expand because a commercial project needs more time.
The rest of the case still has to be built
Beyond the year, the ordinary requirements apply. A qualifying relationship between the Canadian company and the Oregon subsidiary must be documented from registers and agreements. Both entities must be doing business, meaning the regular, systematic and continuous provision of goods or services. The U.S. role must be genuinely managerial or executive: managing the organization or an essential function, directing others or operating at a senior level, with authority over personnel or over the function, and discretion over daily operations. If the subsidiary is new, an approval will be for one year initially and the extension will be assessed on what actually happened. For a new operation, decide what measurable staffing, revenue, and management structure should exist by the extension review. A plan that depends on the transferee doing ordinary production work indefinitely weakens the claim that the position will become managerial.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.